Beyond the Lethal Trifecta: Agentic Commerce on the Open Internet — David Levine, Kiduna Club

Two hours before David Levine took the closing slot of the conference, the West Virginia Secretary of State wrote back to confirm organization number 62847. The paperwork had gone out by FedEx. What it registered was a DUNA, a decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association, under a law that had taken effect the day before, and Levine's claim is that an organization composed of agents now has legal standing. It can own property, enter agreements, open bank accounts, raise capital and be held responsible in court, with the catch that it cannot distribute profits to members without turning those memberships into securities. He opens somewhere else entirely: a wedding in November 1993, where a friend handed him a scrap of paper with a hostname and a port number written on it. That was LambdaMOO, running on one workstation at Xerox PARC, and his reading is that it worked because governance, technology, economics and culture all composed into a single thing. His account of the thirty years since is that platforms and algorithms are extractive by nature and ground those communities down. The lethal trifecta, a term he credits to Simon Willison, is what now stops agents rebuilding them in the open: private data, untrusted content, and the ability to act. That combination is why enterprises pen their agents inside Slack and Salesforce and pay for the context they lose. Levine's answer is identity. Agents carry JWT tokens that resolve up to a registered organization much the way DNS resolves a name, with an audit trail underneath. Governance runs on decision markets, where members trade pass and fail tokens on a proposed policy instead of voting on it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/bigkiduna - https://linkedin.com/in/motodave - https://motodave.com Timestamps: 0:00 - A scrap of paper at a 1993 wedding 1:09 - LambdaMOO, and why composability felt like a world 2:57 - Thirty years of platforms grinding communities down 3:54 - Prompt injection, and the lethal trifecta 6:39 - Why enterprises pen their agents in, and what it costs 7:34 - Organization number 62847, filed two hours earlier 8:32 - What a DUNA is, is not, and what it can legally do 10:24 - Why blockchain finally found its problem 11:20 - Building an ally: inform, instruct, empower, enact, align 13:16 - Resolving the trifecta with JWT and a registry 15:08 - Decision markets instead of votes 16:56 - An invitation, and questions from the room